


what's an evil fear god to a non-believer?

by ceruleancats



Series: oops! all avatars [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Asexual Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Canon Asexual Character, Canon-Typical Worms, Comedy, Desolation!Tim, Getting Together, Humor, M/M, Season 1, Slow Burn, Spiral!Sasha, Web!Martin, a tiny bit of murder but don't worry they deserve it, canon typical tooth apples, eldritch office shenanigans, ish?, season 1 AU, slightly more than canon-typical spiders, somewhat cracky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-05-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:27:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 18,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23639815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceruleancats/pseuds/ceruleancats
Summary: Martin Blackwood, avatar of the Web, has been given a simple assignment by the Mother: get rid of the newly appointed Archivist by whatever means necessary, ideally by rescuing him from the Eye and converting him into a servant of the Spider. This is slightly complicated by two things:1. Jonathan Sims hates spiders.2. Despite the many things he's seen/heard/experienced that would fully convince even the staunchest of skeptics, Jonathan Sims does not believe in the supernatural.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood & Sasha James, Martin Blackwood & Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Series: oops! all avatars [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1818265
Comments: 575
Kudos: 726





	1. spiders and candles and crushes, oh my!

**Author's Note:**

> So, this is a season 1 AU where all of Jon's assistants are actually avatars of other Entities, and Martin in particular has been tasked by the Web to get Jon to quit the Institute because of Ineffable Web Plans. This is my first time writing a multi-chaptered fic, so we'll see how it goes (please be gentle). I'm sure my upload schedule will be entirely chaotic and based entirely on my rapidly oscillating Quarantine Motivation TM, so that'll be fun for you guys. Anyway. 
> 
> Please enjoy and let me know if ya liked it! More soon (probably).

As was becoming an unfortunate pattern in his increasingly complicated life, Martin Blackwood had a problem. The problem was this: he was a servant, also known as an avatar, of an eons old eldritch spider Entity, tasked with determining the threat posed by, and if necessary removing from power/seducing/disposing of by whatever means deemed appropriate, a newly appointed servant of another Entity, known as the Eye. This meant going undercover and infiltrating said newly appointed servant's place of work, as much as one could go undercover in what was essentially a temple to the evil god of Knowing Secret Things. That alone was somewhat complex, but ultimately manageable given Martin’s, shall we say _gift_ , for manipulation. The _problem_ was that no matter what Martin did or said or otherwise implied, and despite the man’s literal status as a Fear Servant and the statements of paranormal encounters he read on a daily basis, Jonathan Sims, the Archivist, was supernaturally dedicated to not believing in the supernatural. 

This was a positive in exactly one sense, which was that it made Jon unequivocally Not A Threat, and therefore Martin was not under any obligation from his Spider Mother to kill him. However, it made it very, very difficult to accomplish the alternative to that course of action, which was to convince Jon that he was working for a bad god and he should leave the Magnus Institute and defect to Martin’s far superior spider Entity. Oh yeah, and there was also the whole part where Jon absolutely fucking hated spiders. That also complicated things just a bit. Speaking of…

“Martin! Please come to my office! There is a spider, and it is staring at me! I think it wants to kill me!” said Jon very calmly and cheerfully through the door to his office, as if he thought the spider was like an untamed pitbull that would attack if it sensed fear. Which honestly wasn’t entirely wrong, when it came to the Entities, but, anyway.

Martin got up from his desk and made his way across the Archives proper over to the door to Jon’s office. 

“Martin, that’s the third time this week,” said Tim as he walked past, looking up from where he was assembling a collection of lit candles into a pentagram on his desk. Jon kept confiscating Tim’s candles on the grounds that there were “no sources of ignition allowed in my Archives, Tim, and also where the hell are you getting all of those candles?” but Tim seemed to have an inexplicable lifetime supply. Maybe that was just one of the perks of being an avatar of an Entity that turned your body into wax.

“You really need to control your children,” Tim continued, “or whatever the hell those creepy crawly things are to you. I’m going to start burning them up if this keeps happening, and you know how much I like burning things up.”

Martin sighed. The spiders weren’t exactly his children. More like...cousins? Step-siblings maybe? The Web had some very interesting family relationships. Regardless. “Yes, sorry, Tim. But how am I supposed to convert Jon if he’s so terrified of spiders? I’m trying, er, exposure therapy.”

“And how’s that working out for you?” Tim said, more sarcastically than necessary. 

Martin didn’t deign to answer that clearly rhetorical question, instead opening the door to Jon’s office and peering inside. The scene was basically identical to how it had been the other two times this week, and the several dozen times in the weeks prior: Jon was attempting to look professional while also being as far as physically possible from the spider, which, since the spider was crawling sedately over Jon’s desk, meant he was attempting to become one with the far wall of his office. 

Jon’s eyes snapped to meet Martin’s immediately, and his mouth curled into something that might charitably be called a grimace. “Hello, Martin. I would be incredibly indebted to you if you did me the favor of removing that spider from my desk.”

Martin pushed down his disappointment that the one psychological technique he had Wikihowed had again failed (he was beginning to think perhaps Wikihow actually did not have all the answers, surprisingly enough), and let the spider crawl onto his hand. 

Jon gave a full-body shudder of either revulsion or relief and detached himself from the wall. “Thank you,” he said shortly, sounding like it pained him greatly to express gratitude. 

Martin nodded. “No worries. But also, Jon, this spider reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about for a while,” he said, segueing expertly to the one topic he’d been unsuccessfully attempting to explain to Jon for so many weeks: the existence of the eldritch Entities of which everyone in the Archives was an avatar. “That is, these spiders aren’t just spiders, they’re manifestations of—”

“Martin, for the love of god, _please_ get that spider out of my office,” Jon interjected, eyeing where it was making its way up Martin’s sleeve.

“But—” Martin tried, to no avail.

“Get. It. Out.” 

“There are Entities—”

“MARTIN, KINDLY REMOVE THE SPIDER FROM THIS OFFICE OR I WILL REMOVE YOU WITH IT,” Jon said, pointing a goddamn revolver at Martin, which he had apparently been keeping in his desk drawer. Not that it could kill him (perks of being an avatar), but it would still definitely not be pleasant.

Martin wilted. One day, he’d be able to explain everything about the Entities and convince Jon of the superiority of spiders. One day. 

“Okay, Jon,” he said calmly, before backing himself and the spider, now perched on his shoulder, out of the office. 

“And don’t come back until it’s _gone_ ,” Jon called vehemently, slightly muffled due to Martin having closed the door on his way out.

Martin sighed and began the walk of shame past Tim and Sasha’s desks towards the Archives’ exit to let the spider, which he had begun to mentally call Jeremy, run free outside. 

Tim was staring intently into his candle pentagram and ignored Martin, but Sasha met his gaze from the other side of the room and gave him a thumbs up. 

“Sounded like that went great, Martin! I think he’s really starting to like you back,” she said, smiling at him in a way that made Martin’s eyes hurt, mainly due to the way her teeth flashed and glitched like a broken computer monitor. 

Martin felt his cheeks heat up, and he almost said “Really?” before his brain broke through her stupid Spiral lie hypnotism. He frowned at Sasha. “You know, lying about that isn’t very nice.”

She giggled at him, which, as always, gave Martin an immediate pounding headache. “I almost got you though, didn’t I?”

“No,” Martin lied uselessly to an avatar of lying. 

“Don’t worry, I’m sure Jon will warm up to those spiders eventually,” Sasha said encouragingly, reaching up to pat him on the shoulder without Jeremy on it. It tingled painfully with that pins and needles sensation until Martin carefully ducked out from under her arm.

“...Thanks, Sasha.”

“Not like he has terrible, formative childhood trauma related to the very Entity you’re trying to seduce him into joining,” she said rapidly under her breath.

“What?” asked Martin, attempting to untangle that sentence.

“Nothing!” Sasha chirped, waving him away. “Better get that thing outside before Jon ventures out of his office!”

Martin shook his head in an attempt to clear his head (it did nothing but make his headache worse). “Right. I’ll go do that, then.”

When he got outside, Martin put Jeremy down on the outside wall of the Institute and stared into his many eyes. “You’re the only bitch in this house I ever respected,” he told Jeremy.

Jeremy did not respond, since he was a spider. Fucking typical.


	2. haunted by the chilling concept of your boss’s boss bullying you about your crush on your boss

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did i stay up until an ungodly hour last night vibing and writing this chapter instead of doing the sizable amount of work that i have let pile up over the last several days? i mean really, who's to say?

Having been “working for” Jon (in quotes because, y’know, the whole ulterior eldritch motive) for a few months now, Martin was intimately familiar with the overpowering wave of incredulity (tinged with a hint of admiration) he experienced whenever Jon happened upon something so very obviously supernatural and deemed it a hoax, occasionally directly to its face. Somehow, Martin was still not used to this phenomenon, even though it happened basically every other day, since everyone in the Archives was a monster and did not at all attempt to hide that fact. In this particular moment, though, Martin was absolutely floored by Jon’s attempt to explain away his Statement Of The Week to an audience of all his assistants.

“There is absolutely a completely logical, rational, and normal explanation for why Vittery was found completely encased in an enormous spider web,” Jon was saying stiffly, over the badly stifled amusement of all three of them.

“Jon, completely serious question here,” said Tim, undermining that statement somewhat with the nasty wide grin on his face, “do you think it was thousands of normal sized spiders that happened to be in this guy’s flat working together, or just one really fucking big one?”

Jon glared at him. “Tim, I would greatly appreciate it if you’d take these things seriously. I’m sure it was many spiders working in concert, and I’m also sure that if you asked anyone knowledgeable about spiders, they would agree with me that encasing a corpse entirely in web is very typical spider behavior.” 

Tim stared back at Jon, uncowed. “Boss, in the nicest way possible, do you know literally anything about spiders?”

At this point, Martin felt compelled to intercede before they had another revolver incident, or another burning-off-half-of-Jon’s-hair incident. 

“Spiders are really smart, actually, and I’m sure it’s possible that they, er, how did you put it — encased a person completely in web. In fact, if you want, I can explain a bit about how web making works—”

“Thank you, Martin,” Jon interjected, with somewhat of a grimace and another dirty look towards Tim. “I appreciate your support and...expertise.” 

Yeah, well. It’d been worth a try. At least he’d gotten a semi-genuine expression of gratitude, which was more than usual (and how pathetic was it to feel little flutters in his stomach over a thanks that had probably been more to shut him up than anything else?). Martin banished that little tidbit of a thought to the dark recesses of his mind where he stored everything else he didn’t feel like unpacking and cleared his throat.

“Happy to help, Jon. Oh, but also, what about that ghost spider he was seeing the whole time? Isn’t that neat? A ghost spider is definitely in my top five beings to be haunted by.”

“I would rather be haunted by the question of whether or not someone would be considered alive and the same person if their brain was scanned and uploaded to a computer,” said Sasha cheerfully. 

“Oooh, nice one, Sash. I’d want to be haunted by a sexy serial arsonist,” Tim said, giving Sasha what was probably a very pins-and-needle-y high five, in Martin’s experience (although it was somewhat unclear if Desolation avatars really had nerves to tingle, given the whole wax thing). 

“There was no _ghost spider_ ,” Jon said derisively, ignoring his other two assistants (a very practiced move). “It was clearly a hallucination. Also, no, that is the absolute opposite of ‘neat,’ Martin. Even if I were to entertain this ridiculous notion of ‘ghosts,’ I would rather die than be haunted by a spider.”

Martin frowned. This was...not a great sign for his whole conversion plan. But he had to stay positive! Of course Jon wouldn’t think being _haunted_ by a spider was a good thing; what was Martin thinking? “Haunted” had such a negative connotation. Surely if it were more of a friendly stalking, or just a keeping an eye on you from a distance-type thing, Jon would be more open to it. Martin just had to workshop this a little more.

“Haha, right, of course,” Martin said, slightly less enthusiastically than normal.

“Yes. Now, I would very much appreciate it if we could all stop talking about spiders. I am going to go eat something. If there is a spider in my office when I come back, I will shoot something. Most likely the spider, but you never know.”

With that ominous oath, Jon exited towards the kitchen. As soon as he disappeared from view, Tim dropped the somewhat smarmy smirk he usually wore in Jon’s presence to frown contemplatively at Martin. 

“...What is it, Tim?” Martin asked reluctantly, with no small amount of trepidation.

“Martin, buddy, you know I totally respect you and think you’re a swell guy, even if you do like spiders a little too much and somehow don’t think scorching the earth and boiling the seas and generally burning down the world is the ideal five year plan, but seriously. You’re gay? For _that_?” Tim pointed theatrically to the Archives kitchen, where the muffled sounds of Jon cursing at the objectively haunted microwave could be faintly heard.

Goddamn it, did literally everyone know? Was he going to get bullied about his stupid crush by Elias next, or something? Martin shuddered to even think it.

“He has his...moments,” Martin hazarded. The cursing continued, with a sudden noticeable increase in volume and vehemence. “Y’know, every...once in a while.”

“Tim, don’t scare him off!” Sasha hissed, swatting Tim’s arm. “It’s great entertainment! Truly the only thing getting me through the day.”

She turned to Martin. “Martin, you know, I think Jon would really love it if you put a spider inside his tape recorder right now.” 

Sasha always did have the best ideas! Jon definitely would appreciate that. Martin turned to go do — oh, mother _fucker_. Fool him nineteen times, shame still on her.

Martin smiled at Sasha innocently. “Sure, Sasha. And how about you go dump that cup of tea over there on Tim’s head?”

As the tea boiled violently off of Tim’s hair and Martin ran for cover, he concluded that sometimes, it was morally acceptable to use little a eldritch powers on your asshole coworkers/rival fear servants/friends. As a treat.


	3. in which the spiders have a mind of their own and also need to brush up on their spelling skills

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> apologies for the ridiculously inconsistent upload schedule, but i'm going to be real with you guys. it's never going to be consistent, because i am a whole ass mess. regardless. hope you enjoy this latest wacky installment that finally hints at the fact that there is somewhat of a plot, albeit meandering, in this fic!

There were raised voices coming from the direction of Jon’s office, which wasn’t exactly an uncommon occurrence. However, in this case, it wasn’t just Jon’s voice cursing at his laptop, his tape recorder, or various misbehaving office supplies; it definitely sounded more like a conversation, and since Sasha and Tim were out “researching” (read: fucking around and terrorizing other undeserving Institute employees), it was probably...Elias. Disgusting. 

Martin fucking hated that guy and his slimy little amateur attempts at manipulation. The feeling was very much mutual, as unfortunately Martin’s cover as an innocent, tea-brewing human couldn’t do much to fool someone who could essentially read minds and Know everyone’s secrets. Martin had enough Spider Power to keep Elias from firing him, which Elias obviously resented. So since Elias couldn’t fire Martin and Martin couldn’t kill Elias (if his little “beating heart of the Institute” claim was to be believed), they were currently at a bit of a stalemate. All this to say that whatever was going on between Elias and Jon right now was something Martin needed to be aware of, just in case it was part of some kind of new evil plot Elias was attempting to kickstart.

Martin cast his mind towards one of the various spiders he had hiding out in Jon’s office, which was a completely workplace appropriate and not at all creepy thing to do, and tuned into the conversation.

“—investigating the Lukas family,” Elias was saying. “I quite need those alimony ch—I mean, the Lukas family is a major patron of the Institute, and we rely on their generous donations for a significant portion of our budget.”

“I understand what you’re saying, Elias, but I’m 98% sure they’re some kind of cult and I really think there’s a good chance they’re murdering people?” Jon said.

“Cult?” Elias echoed, and then laughed somewhat hysterically for an uncomfortably extended period of several seconds. “Jon, don’t be absurd. They’re just...very religious. You know how it is.”

There was a long beat of silence. Martin imagined Jon was giving Elias his patented You’re Actually Trying To Bullshit Me On This One? Me? Good Fucking Luck With That, Buddy face. (Or at least that’s what Martin called it in his head. For the less poetically inclined, it was basically a frown paired with two very raised eyebrows.) 

“Uh huh,” Jon said. 

“Yes,” Elias said. 

“You’re sure,” Jon said.

“Very sure.”

“Well, seems legit, I apologize. You’re clearly a very honest and well-meaning boss, so I have no reason to doubt what you’re telling me in good faith,” Jon said, with unfortunately absolutely zero of his normal grumpy sarcasm. 

Martin resisted the urge to slam his head against the desk. So far he had been equally unsuccessful in convincing Jon that Elias was objectively an evil “person” as his whole “the supernatural is real” campaign.

“Thank you, Jon, I truly appreciate it,” Elias said, sounding entirely too smug for Martin’s tastes.

Jon’s office door opened as Elias stepped out, and Martin retracted his awareness from the spider in order to be able to properly glare at him. Elias glared back with equal venom as he closed the door behind him.

“Martin,” he said icily.

“Elias,” Martin returned, with equivalent icy-ness. 

“Due to recent conduct involving considerably more spiders in the Archives than acceptable, I am sad to say that I will have to let you g—” Elias began, until Martin realized what was happening and engaged the Threads he had wrapped around Elias’s jaws. “—et yet another raise. How does an additional twenty pounds an hour sound?”

Martin smiled widely at him, ignoring the way Elias’s eyes narrowed to rage-filled slits. “I would be honored. I’m glad my contributions here are being recognized. Thank you, Elias.” The bastard wasn’t entirely useless, at least. Martin’s salary was now well into the six figures from all the times Elias had tried to fire him, yet he was still trying. Very definition of insanity. 

“The pleasure is all mine,” Martin made Elias say, with some difficulty, as his concentration was being interrupted by the horrible nightmare images Elias was attempting to beam directly into Martin’s brain. 

Martin dropped the Threads in favor of shielding his beleaguered brain. Elias snapped his jaw shut and bared his teeth. “One of these days, Martin,” he hissed. 

“If you say so,” Martin replied, with more bravado than was probably wise. He should really take Elias more seriously, but it was so, so hard to do when the man was a good foot and a half shorter even with his ridiculous heeled boots. 

Elias snarled wordlessly in response and stalked out of the Archives, muttering something about brutal pipes, whatever that meant. Definitely not worth worrying about. 

— 

“MARTIN, GET THE VACUUM CLEANER!”

Oh god. Martin’s spiders had gotten a little overzealous again, hadn’t they. 

“Hah, what’d you do this time, Blackwood?” Tim asked, smirking. He was methodically melting Jon’s extra staples into a small silver puddle in the middle of his desk, which was smoking angrily in protest. Martin predicted the Institute would have its second fire alarm and evacuation of the week sometime in the next three minutes. At least that would distract Jon and hopefully divert some of his rage. 

“MARTIN! VACUUM! NOW!” growled Jon’s voice from the direction of his office.

Martin dutifully ignored Tim and went to grab the vacuum from the storage closet. He poked his head into Jon’s office, holding the vacuum out in front of him as a peace offering. 

The necessity of the vacuum was rather immediately evident: Jon’s entire desk was criss-crossed with webbing, within which the words “JOIN US JON P.S. THE SUPERNATURAL IS REEL” were clearly visible. 

Jon glared at him and snatched the vacuum. “I’m sure you think this is a hilarious prank, Martin, but I do not. And even if it is April Fools Day today, this is not at all workplace appropriate behavior.”

Martin stared at him, slightly guiltily. “Er, Jon, it’s September.”

“I knew that,” Jon snapped. “Anyway, I’m very disappointed you would resort to such childish nonsense. There is no such thing as the supernatural, and pulling a ridiculous prank like this is convincing me of nothing but the fact that I have a bunch of toddlers for assistants, one of which who can’t spell the word ‘real.’”

Okay, ouch. That seemed a little harsh. Sasha was at least equivalent to a middle schooler. And also, how the hell did Jon think wrapping someone’s entire desk in spider webs and spelling out a message in them was a thing that could be pulled off without supernatural assistance in the literally five minutes Jon had been out of his office for lunch? 

He tried to tell Jon as much, but Jon picked that exact moment to turn on the vacuum cleaner and begin sucking up the webs from his desk. Naturally. Martin gave up trying to talk over the vacuum and instead started to think. It wasn’t like a logical protest like that was going to convince Jon anyway, at least not without some harder evidence. Maybe….the Vittery case. Jon had been skeptical, obviously, but what if Martin went to investigate further and found something undeniably supernatural at the man’s flat? It was worth a try, at least.

Finally, Jon turned the vacuum off. “Were you trying to say something, Martin? Apologizing, perhaps?” Jon asked leadingly.

“...Sorry, it won’t happen again,” Martin said, looking at the ground to avoid Jon’s accusing eyes. He really did need to keep a tighter leash on those office spiders and make sure they didn’t act on his subconscious desire to convert Jon. But he was going to do it! Vittery flat, tonight.

Jon grunted in what Martin assumed was simultaneously an acceptance of his apology and a dismissal from Jon’s office, and shoved the vacuum back into Martin’s arms. 

Martin smiled tentatively at Jon as he stepped backwards towards the door. Jon grimaced back and shut the door in Martin’s face. But that didn’t matter, because Martin had a Plan.


	4. contrary to popular belief, there IS an important use for that one tiny pocket on all your pairs of jeans

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i love writing this fic instead of working on my three projects that are due in the next one to two weeks hahahahaha i am the pinnacle of time management :))))

The plan went like this: get to Vittery’s building. Check. Get _into_ Vittery’s building. Sort of check? In that Martin found an open basement window to squeeze through and promptly fell directly onto his face, got the air knocked out of his lungs, and inhaled unfortunate quantities of basement floor dust trying to get his breath back. 

Martin was about to remove his face from the ground and get started on step three (getting into Vittery’s flat itself and poking around), and the subsequent step four (finding irrefutable evidence of ghost spiders), when he realized he could hear something...squirmy coming from the opposite end of the basement. Delightful. He couldn’t see whatever awful thing was doing the squirming, since he was in a basement at night with zero lights on, so he held a brief, rousing internal debate on whether or not to turn on his phone torch for some light. 

Conclusion: he wouldn’t be able to see without it, but the thing might, so torch it was. Martin pulled himself from the floor carefully and emptied his back pocket of his phone, thankfully unharmed by his entrance to the basement due to his face absorbing a hundred percent of the fall damage. He tapped the torch on and, before he could lose his nerve, swung it towards the source of the squirming. 

Ah, naturally. A worm lady. If he was remembering his statements correctly, the body of the woman formerly (and probably currently) known as Jane Prentiss, now filled head to toe with holes and, judging by the sudden increase in volume and speed of the squirming, a very excited colony (?) of worms. 

Martin stared at Prentiss. Prentiss stared at Martin (well, presumably. Her eyes were sort of filled with worms so honestly it was a little difficult to tell). 

“Hello,” Martin said without meaning to, unable to resist the burning urge to be polite even though he was talking to a sentient worm horde piloting the somewhat decomposed corpse of a woman. 

“Gggsshshshhhhhhhhhhhuuuuuuuuggsgddddds?” said Prentiss, cocking her head at him in what Martin was choosing to interpret as an unthreatening manner. 

“Er, I didn’t quite catch that. Could you repeat it?” Martin’s mouth said automatically. Jesus Christ, he really had to reel in the “be polite to eldritch abominations” instinct. But, like, she wasn’t attacking yet, so maybe that approach was actually working?

Prentiss held up a finger and coughed extensively and disgustingly for about twenty seconds, discharging a physically impossible quantity of worms to the floor with a series of sickening thumps. “I said, what is one of the Spider’s children doing in my basement?”

“I mean, it’s hardly _your_ basement,” Martin said, raising an eyebrow. The worms now on the floor squirmed in a distinctly angry fashion. “Right, your basement, of course. Well, the thing is, I’m kind of just looking for proof of the supernatural to convince my boss that it’s real so that I can convince him he’s working for the wrong evil eldritch fear so that I can convince him he should come join the objectively best one, the Web.” Huh, laying it out like that made it sound a little daunting.

“...Fair enough,” said Prentiss. “But the Corruption is objectively the best. Here, you can have one of my worms to take with you to prove that to your boss.” She held out her hand, and a worm crawled directly out of a hole in her palm.

“Oh, a worm! Thaaaaanks,” Martin said, in a rather unfortunate impression of that one vine where the kid unwraps a present to find an avocado (which he did _not_ know about because he watched vine compilations when he was supposed to be researching, who said that?).

He walked forward to receive the worm, but before he’d taken more than a few steps, there was a loud, squishy crunch from beneath his foot. Shit. The floor worms, he’d forgotten about the floor worms!

Prentiss’s eyes narrowed in rage (presumably, because again, too many holes and worms to tell), and all the worms writhed wildly. 

“Haha, oops,” said Martin, gingerly lifting up his foot. 

Prentiss snarled, and every single worm in the basement _screamed_ despite the fact that they didn’t seem to have mouths, which was just fantastic. 

“I’m just gonna go,” Martin said, smiling politely and gesturing at the window, which he was just noticing was actually set rather high up in the wall (that explained why his face was still throbbing).

The worms continued to scream, and the ones by his feet squirmed furiously at his pant legs. So this was not ideal. It was looking like about time to break out the spiders.

Martin broke out the spiders (also known as letting all the spiders that liked to hang out in various locations on his person, mostly in those tiny pockets jeans had that everyone thought were useless — well guess what, they were the perfect size for SPIDERS — jump out and start attacking the worms). 

Physically impossible amount of worms crammed into a woman, meet physically impossible amount of spiders crammed into Martin’s jean pockets! 

The spiders set upon the worms in a glorious feeding frenzy, and Martin cheered them on as he retreated rapidly towards the window, grabbing a conveniently placed box that had been sitting up against the wall. He put the box down underneath the window, stepped onto it, and was about to begin squeezing himself back out of the basement when, over the noise of worms in agony, he heard the ominous sound of squishy footsteps behind him. Oh god. 

Martin whirled around, his phone flying out of his hand with the speed of his turn and clattering to floor, and shoved his hand into his jacket pocket to retrieve his ultimate weapon: big fucking tarantula. He threw the tarantula directly at Prentiss’s face, and as she and her worms screamed in anger, pain, and possibly despair, Martin lunged for the window and heaved himself up and through it onto the ground outside. 

He slammed the window shut behind him before any worms could jump through it, and met Prentiss’s eyes (presumably) through the dusty glass for a moment, from where she was standing backlit by the torchlight from his phone which was, goddamn it, lying on the ground behind her. Well, he’d been due for an upgrade anyway.

Before Prentiss had a chance to climb out after him, Martin waved at her guiltily and bolted for the street. He felt bad leaving all his spiders there to fend for themselves, since those worms looked very vicious, but. He had to get to the Institute. He had to tell Jon what had happened. He had to get Jon to believe.

Oh, for fuck’s sake, he had no evidence.


	5. the inherent romance of weird gifts your boss digs out of his desk drawer and gives to you in the middle of the night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay, i think i can promise at least one chapter a week, probably. this week's been busier since the projects I've been procrastinating on have caught up to me, but why work when i can write fic? i'm a great student.

Martin made it back to the Institute without incident, although he found himself checking over his shoulder for worms or worm ladies every couple seconds, just in case. There had been an incident on the tube where he saw a woman in a red dress out of the corner of his eye and was a millisecond from whipping out another pocket tarantula, but it turned out it actually was just a woman in a red dress minding her own business and not a sentient worm colony casually taking the tube in order to follow him halfway across the city.

Once he got into the building, he realized it was kind of empty, probably because it was literally the middle of the goddamn night. Right, that. Well, he’d check the Archives just in case Jon happened to be there, since he had it on good authority that Jon often stayed in his office until ridiculous hours of the morning (the good authority was Tim, who had once tried to sneak into the Archives after hours to commit some light statement arson for kicks, and instead ran into Jon having what Tim described as an “intimate conversation with his tape recorder”). The hallways of the Institute were eerily dim, with just the faint glow of emergency lights guiding his way down to the Archives, and Martin found himself literally starting at the movement of his own shadow. So...maybe the worms had put him a bit more on edge than he really wanted to admit. The Corruption was fucking creepy, okay? Nothing to be ashamed of.

The door to the Archives was closed, and looking through the glass window in it, it seemed like the lights were off. Great. So no Jon. Martin opened the door and poked his head in anyway, just to make sure Jon wasn’t chilling with the lights off for whatever reason (it just seemed like the sort of weirdass thing Jon would do), and sure enough, he could hear the faint sound of Jon’s mumbling coming from his office at the other end of the Archives. Okay! Back on track.

Martin made his way over, trying and summarily failing not to imagine worms leaping out at him from the assistant desks and myriad stacks of statements heaped around the room, and knocked a few times on the office door.

Jon’s mumbling cut off abruptly. “Who’s there?” he asked suspiciously through the door. “If you’re Elias, I told you last time, my sleep schedule is perfectly normal and consistent and not affecting my job performance whatsoever, and to be honest, it’s kind of creepy that you know how exactly many hours of sleep I’m getting on a nightly basis. If you’re not Elias, I have a gun, and I’m not afraid to use it.”

There was a lot to unpack there, but Martin would rather just throw away the whole suitcase and focus on the point of him being there. “Er, it’s Martin?”

“Oh, Martin, what on earth are _you_ doing here so late?” Jon said as he opened the door, gun hanging loosely by his side with the safety clearly off. 

“Uh,” said Martin, eyeing the gun somewhat nervously, “how about you put away the loaded weapon and then I’ll tell you?”

“This old thing?” Jon asked, waving the gun around casually. Martin ducked as it was pointed vaguely towards his head. “Don’t worry, it’s just a deterrent for burglars and the occasional spider.”

“Right,” said Martin, still ducking, and wondering if maybe a gun could work as a worm deterrent as well, “but I’m not a burglar or a spider, so could you please maybe not point it at my head?”

“Ah, yes. Sorry about that,” Jon said, sounding only marginally apologetic, but he flicked the safety back on and set the gun down on his desk. “So, what brings you here?” He sat back down behind the desk and motioned for Martin to take the chair in front of it. 

Martin straightened back up from his gun-avoiding crouch and did so. “Well, I was doing some investigating tonight, of the Vittery flat, you know, the guy who was encased—”

“Encased entirely in web, yes, I’m aware,” Jon interjected dryly.

“Yes, that. Well, the door to the building was locked, but I was able to get in through a basement window, and, long story short, I had a run in with Jane Prentiss.”

“Oh god, the worm woman?” Jon sounded disgusted. “You didn’t get, er, infected by her, did you?”

“No, none of the worms got me,” Martin said slowly. “A huge flood of spiders, ah….appeared and attacked the worms for long enough for me to get away. The spiders were so amazing, like, I really owe them my life! Spiders are so cool and talented, you know?”

“Uh huh,” Jon said, only wincing a little at the mention of spiders. “I don’t really see how spiders would help in this situation, given that it’s just a woman with a very strange parasite.”

“Jon, I know you don’t believe me, but I promise you it’s not just a parasite. This woman is literally a corpse filled with a bunch of evil sentient worms.” Martin tried to convey absolute solemnity with his expression, hoping Jon wouldn’t think this was another one of his “pranks.”

“Martin, you really expect me to believe—” Jon started, but was interrupted by his phone buzzing from its precarious perch on a pile of statements. Jon glanced over at the lit-up screen idly, but then jerked his head back, eyes narrowed at Martin. “Are you seriously sending me texts right now?” he snapped.

What? Martin didn’t even have his phone with him, because _it had fallen out of his hand back in the basement_. Jane Prentiss had his phone! And was...texting Jon with it? “I swear to you, that’s not me. I lost my phone in the basement; I think that’s Jane Prentiss texting with my phone.” He spread his hands, showing Jon that he didn’t have his phone on him. 

Jon’s eyebrows furrowed, but he seemed to agree that it physically couldn’t be Martin doing the texting. He grabbed his phone and opened up the text. “‘Fuck you and your spiders. Worms will reign supreme,’” he read. “And then there’s about seven worm emojis. Okay, I do hate spiders, but even I think that’s a little rude.”

“So, do you believe me about the sentient worms now?” Martin asked halfheartedly. He didn’t really think this would be enough to convince Jon, but it was worth trying (so the sacrifice of his phone to the worms wasn’t in vain, at least).

“Martin, I understand that you believe in these kinds of things, sentient worms and ghost spiders, but there really is a perfectly rational, scientific explanation for all so-called ‘supernatural’ occurrences.” Well, still no success, but this was the nicest Jon had ever been about it, so, progress?

“Right,” Martin said, trying not to let too much dismay color his tone.

Jon seemed to notice the way he wilted, though. “Well, er, I do think it’s rather creepy that Prentiss is using your phone, so just in case she tries to stalk you or whatnot, I think I’ve got something useful in here,” he said, rummaging through his desk drawer. Martin silently prayed to the Mother that it wasn’t going to be another gun.

Thankfully, it wasn’t another gun. What Jon did offer Martin across the desk was instead a small canister of pepper spray and a larger bottle of insecticide. “Just in case there _are_ any sentient worms,” he said of the second offering, sounding slightly embarrassed.

Martin was legitimately touched, even if neither of those things would probably be wildly effective if Prentiss did decide to attack. Had Jon ever done anything that nice for him before? For anyone, for that matter? He felt his cheeks heat up a bit as he reached for the proffered items. “Thank you, Jon,” he said softly, steadfastly not thinking gay thoughts about the way his hands brushed Jon’s as he took the bottles.

“Of course,” Jon replied, voice equally soft. There was a beat of silence, somehow simultaneously comfortable and awkward, before Jon cleared his throat loudly. 

“So. I suppose we should probably both get home, given the hour,” he said, tone back to its usual mix of grouchy and business-like. “We both have work tomorrow, after all.”

“Oh yes, it is kind of late, isn’t it?” Martin pushed down a faint swirl of disappointment, though he wasn’t entirely sure where it had come from. 

Jon grabbed his coat from the back of his chair and shrugged it on, gesturing for Martin to go ahead of him. They left the office and the Archives together, and for the first time since he’d seen Prentiss, Martin wasn’t thinking about worms.


	6. the hot new thing to do with friends: get your fire extinguishers and go spray a corpse filled with sentient worms!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i don't really have anything to say about this one except that in this universe, sasha and tim still had their little unadvised fling and Tim is Not Over Her. oh, and thank you to everyone who's commenting!!!! i'm so glad y'all are enjoying the ride <3

Martin was several minutes into avoiding doing the research Jon had assigned him by staring absently at a spider making its painstaking way across the ceiling of the Archives, when he was rudely interrupted by Sasha bursting into the room and slamming the door loudly against the wall, looking even more like a shambling mass of glitchy fractals out of the corner of his eye than usual (which meant she was excited). Martin scrambled to hide the bottle of insecticide, which he’d been keeping on his person at all times since Jon had given it to him, and that he had apparently been unconsciously cradling in his arms as he slacked off. He shoved it surreptitiously into his desk drawer and smiled at Sasha, who was now passing Martin’s desk on her way back to hers. 

“Hello there, Martin!” she called, in a voice that was almost uncomfortably cheerful.

“Hello, Sasha, what’s got you so...energetic today?” 

At this point, Jon poked his head out of his office grumpily, summoned like a sweater vest-wearing demon by the sound of people definitely not doing work. “What on earth is going on out here?”

“Oh hello, Jon!” Sasha said, just as sunnily as she’d greeted Martin. “I’m just back from my coffee with Michael!” 

“ _Who_?” asked Jon snappily. “Also, who allowed you to go get coffee during work hours?”

“Oh, you know, Michael! My fellow eldritch incarnation of It Is Not What It Is? Haven’t I mentioned him around here before?” Sasha said, expertly not answering Jon’s second question. Ah, right. Martin had heard about the Distortion before but never had the pleasure of meeting him in person (which was probably for the best, given what he’d heard). 

“Man, I fucking hate that guy,” Tim muttered from his own desk, moodily melting several paper clips into slag. “He is _way_ too into doors. Like, what’s even the deal with that? Get a fucking hobby.”

Jon ignored Tim’s commentary, as he normally did, and stared at Sasha somewhat bemusedly. “I have no idea what that means. Do you want to make a statement?”

“Oh sure, why not?” said Sasha genially. “Do you have a tape recor—of course you do.” Jon had pulled one out of his pocket that definitely had _not_ been there a second before, but he didn’t seem to notice that fact. “Statement of Sasha James, regarding a coffee date with Michael, the Distortion. My boyfriend.”

“Your WHAT?” Tim snarled, suddenly outraged, at the same time that Jon mumbled, seemingly to himself, “Of course, so that’s what the kids are calling their significant others these days. Pet names are such an interesting cultural phenomenon.”

“Yeah, we’ve been dating for a while now. I thought I told you?” Sasha said, smiling innocently at Tim. The temperature in the room rose instantly by several degrees, and the sad remains of a paper clip dripped from Tim’s hand onto his desk, smoking angrily. 

Sasha let Tim’s (somewhat literal) meltdown continue for a few seconds before dissolving into glitchy-looking giggles. “Oh wow, I totally had you for a second there! No, we’re just friends. Kindred spirits, and such.”

“I hate you,” said Tim, slamming his face into the puddle of liquid paperclip on his desk. 

“Oh, come on now, you know you love me,” Sasha said teasingly, going over to pat Tim comfortingly on the shoulder.

There had been a ridiculous amount of evidence of the supernatural being real in this one thirty second conversation, so Martin looked back at Jon, hoping to see shock or horror or _something_ evident on his face, but was instead met with the sight of Jon’s glazed eyes and continued mumbling about the origin of pet names and their apparently significant impact on modern society. 

“Are you fucking kidding me,” Martin couldn’t help saying, making sustained eye contact with the spider on the ceiling, because this was his life now. He had a crush on a fucking idiot, albeit one with suprisingly deep wells of knowledge on such topics as pet names and emusifiers. The spider made a shrugging motion that Martin interpreted as “sometimes it be like that.”

By the time Martin stopped commiserating with the ceiling spider, Jon had finished his pet name monologue and nudged Sasha back into giving her statement. All the liquid paper clip had apparently gotten hot enough to literally evaporate (probably not great for the lungs, but they’d all been breathing in various chemical fumes from Tim’s hobby of melting office supplies for months now, so oh well), and Sasha was back to only looking fractal-y out of the corner of Martin’s eye. Another chance to prove to Jon the existence of the supernatural gone. Typical.

“Well, there’s actually not that much to tell,” Sasha was saying. “Michael and I just met at a coffee shop to catch up, share the Spiral gossip. Oh, I did tell him about how Jane Prentiss was being mean to you, Martin, and he had a good tip on that: apparently fire extinguishers work really well against the worms. Something about the CO2 just totally obliterates them. We went and tested it out on a wormified carcass Michael found in some abandoned building — really entertaining, would highly recommend as a fun, free activity to do with friends!”

Well, it looked like Martin was going to be making a trip to the fire extinguisher store as soon as possible. Or wherever one purchased fire extinguishers. Now _this_ was a great use for Martin’s ridiculously high salary (evidence of the objective necessity of his ongoing war of wills with Elias).

“Right,” said Jon, sounding somewhat dubious, “a great bonding activity, I’m sure. But that is good information. I swear I saw one of those worm parasites outside the Institute the other day, and we have no idea how infectious it is, so I’ll be asking Elias to invest in some more fire extinguishers, just in case. Jane Prentiss is not going to be terrorizing my assistants on my watch.”

Martin, whose blood had gone a bit cold at the mention of a worm near the Institute, felt his heart flutter a bit at that last sentence. Jon’s protective streak was largely unnecessary, given that all three of his assistants were relatively powerful avatars that could take care of themselves, but it was still kinda sweet to hear that Jon actually did care, despite the aloof mask he liked to wear. 

“Alright, well, since I gave you good information, does that mean Tim and I can go to lunch early?” Sasha asked hopefully, evidently not as enchanted by Jon’s impassioned speech as Martin was.

“You literally just got back from an unsanctioned coffee-slash-parasite killing break.”

“I’m taking that as a yes!” Sasha chirped, smiling beatifically at Jon. “Come on, Tim, let us away.”

“I still hate you,” said Tim, crabbily enough to make it a good Jon impression, but he trailed Sasha out of the Archives anyway.

Jon closed his eyes and breathed very aggressively for several seconds. “Why do I even bother.”

“Er, well, for the record, I appreciate your leadership very much,” Martin said encouragingly, even though that had probably been an entirely rhetorical question/statement.

“...Thank you, Martin,” Jon said, a bit awkwardly, but he gave Martin a small half-smile as he returned to his office. 

Hey, now _that_ was progress.


	7. some people??? binge watch episodes of a certain cringy youtube ghost hunter show??? to cope??

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i usually try to post earlier in the day but like...the chapter is done now. i have zero impulse control. take it.

Again with the raised voices from Jon’s office? Martin could swear this happened every single time Jon tried to take a statement in person. And this time, Martin actually knew the statement giver: Melanie King from Ghost Hunt UK. Well, “knew” was a strong word for having watched a couple of episodes of her Youtube series (okay, fine, having binged all the episodes when he discovered the show a year ago and having notifications on for her channel ever since. So he was a fan. So what?). Aaaaand now that Martin was thinking about it, the yelling made sense, because if Jon couldn’t get along with fun, relatively friendly “people” like Tim and Sasha, there was no way in hell he was going to be able to have a civil conversation with a YouTuber. 

Martin was straining his ears and debating the merits of using his spider spies again to figure out exactly what was going on, because their voices were muffled through the walls of the office and Martin was kind of a nosy bitch, but he was saved the trouble when the door burst aggressively open and Melanie stormed out into the Archives proper, slamming it behind her. 

She stopped a few steps later, seeming to suddenly notice that there were several other people in the room (Sasha and Tim were actually here, too, and not off terrorizing innocents or whatever the hell they were doing when they waltzed out of the Institute in the middle of the day or didn’t show up until noon), and took in the scene: Martin, unfortunately pretty clearly trying to eavesdrop since he was angled towards the door and leaning halfway over his desk; Tim, creating what looked like some kind of abstract sculpture out of half-melted binder clips; and Sasha, who seemed like she might really be doing work, except she also had her mouth open and was making a noise that sounded exactly like the fan in Martin’s beloved but objectively shitty computer when he tried to open more than one Chrome tab.

Melanie stared mutely at the assistants for a few seconds. Martin slowly eased himself back into a normal sitting position and smiled at her in what he hoped came across as a welcoming way.

“Wow, this place is a freakshow,” she said flatly. “I don’t respect literally any of you people.” Okay, ouch. Not that Martin cared what some YouTuber thought. He was totally not at all crushed by this. Ghost Hunt UK was so overrated, and he was definitely not going to go donate the extensive collection of merch that he had _not_ spent a fair amount of his ridiculous salary on to charity tonight. 

Tim and Sasha were apparently too engrossed in their respective activities to even acknowledge Melanie’s existence, but she continued to voice her thoughts at Martin. 

“Okay, also, your fuckin’ Archivist literally just told me that everything paranormal I experienced was totally fake and I was a dirty liar because the supernatural doesn’t exist, and yet at least two of you bitches are clearly not normal human beings! Because as far as I know, human people cannot melt plastic with their bare hands or make that noise with their mouths. So what the fuck?”

“So you’re being very rude right now, but I’ll explain things to you because I’m a nice person,” Martin said, possibly more passive-aggressively than was strictly necessary. “Let’s just say, he’s a bit of an idiot and it’s not for lack of trying to convince him. Maybe if it comes from someone outside of the Institute—”

“Oh, _hell_ no,” Melanie said over him, “there is no way I’m ever talking to that asshole again.”

“HEY!” Martin snapped back, inexplicably irrationally angry. “Only his assistants are allowed to insult him like that.”

“Maybe he should try being less of a dickhead, and then no one would have to insult him!”

“Well maybe, uh, maybe you’re a dickhead!”

Melanie just looked at him disdainfully and didn’t even bother responding. Which...was honestly fair. How was it that Martin was so good at coming up with the perfect response seven hours later when he reenacted arguments in the shower and yet so terrible at it in the heat of the moment?

“You know what? Just get out of here,” Martin said, trying not to seem as embarrassed as he was about his failure of a comeback. “We don’t need your statement anyway.”

“Fine,” Melanie replied, sounding unfairly unbothered. “I’m telling all my subscribers that the Magnus Institute sucks though.” And with that parting shot, she stalked out of the Archives, head held high. 

“Bye!” said Sasha cheerfully, having stopped whirring like a computer fan to tune back into what was happening precisely when everything that was happening was over.

Well, great. Like the Institute needed more bad press. Then Martin remembered that, oh yeah, that was Elias’s problem, and Martin was a servant of the Web, not the Eye, so it was doubly not his problem, and felt much better. And then Martin thought he should probably go check on Jon, who hadn’t emerged from his office since Melanie had exited it. Hopefully she hadn’t, like, stabbed him with a knife or something, and he was just sulking and not lying on the floor bleeding out. 

Martin knocked on the office door. 

“What?” said Jon after a second, muffled and irritable. Too irritable to be bleeding out, so that was something.

“It’s Martin,” said Martin. “Just wanted to let you know that Melanie’s gone. You can come out now.”

“Hmph,” Jon said, but Martin heard his footsteps moving towards the door. “For the record,” he said as he opened it, “I was not sulking. I just thought it would be...wise for me to stay in here for a while. To...finish up with her statement. Even though it’s obviously false.” That last bit sounded a bit hastily tacked on, but Martin was too busy thinking about how adorable Jon’s pouty face was when he was sulking to really think too hard about that. 

“Martin?”

“Huh?” said Martin, quickly tucking his hopeless gay crush thoughts away into a ridiculously large mental filing cabinet.

“Thanks for, er, defending me, as it were,” Jon said. Awkwardly, because he was Jon, but it sounded genuine enough. Also, shit, had he heard that whole argument?

“Haha, uh, no problem?” Martin said, and then facepalmed internally. 

“You two should kiss!” called Tim from across the room, because apparently he couldn’t be bothered to pay attention or contribute to the conversation when Martin was having a loud argument with a YouTuber five feet from his desk, but was all ears when Martin was having a private gay meltdown in front of his crush/boss. 

Jon flushed. Martin flushed. 

“I—Tim, how dare—That is entirely inappropriate commentary for the workplace!” Jon stuttered out, too flustered to even notice Tim’s binder clip sculpture. 

“Oh, come on, boss, anyone can tell—”

“ _Tim_ ,” Jon snarled, voice suddenly rough with anger. Martin shrunk back, startled at the change in tone. “That is quite enough. Any more comments like that, and I’ll be forced to report you to Elias.” 

“Oh, shit,” Tim said under his breath, sounding almost scared. “Uh, sorry, Jon. It won’t happen again.”

“Good.” Jon took a deep breath in and let it out in a sigh, then turned to Martin. “Apologies,” he said, voice back to its default clipped professionalism, a far cry from the softer tone he’d been using around Martin lately. “Please excuse me.” 

Martin stood frozen, watching dumbly as Jon reentered his office and shut the door firmly behind him.

What the hell had that been?


	8. bro you actually shop for candles? why not just get them from that random box outside the magnus institute? no, i don’t know why it’s there, but why look a gift candle in the mouth?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have no finals until next week. why study when i can write? enjoy the fruits of my procrastination :)
> 
> also thank you so much to everyone commenting!! I love y'all <3333

Martin literally ran into Jon a few days later on the front stoop of the Institute, because he had gotten in the habit of checking the ground for worms as he was walking, and was therefore looking entirely at the ground and didn’t see where Jon was bent over, also looking at something on the ground. Something that turned out to be a particularly squiggly worm.

“Ah—oh god, sorry,” said Martin, backing up several feet immediately. Because of the worm, not because he was awkward around Jon now. They were fine! Everything was fine! Neither of them had mentioned the “Jon Loses His Shit At Tim For Seemingly No Reason” incident, which meant it clearly wasn’t a big deal! Why were Martin’s thoughts all ending in exclamation points right now!

“Excus—oh, Martin, hello. These...parasites seem to be showing up around the Institute more often nowadays, don’t they?” Jon said, his eyes still on the worm as it wriggled aimlessly near his shoe.

“Yeah, isn’t it kind of hazardous to still be working here? Don’t you think we should all just quit, or at least raise an army of spiders from birth and train them to kill and eat the worms?”

“...I was thinking more of spraying down the entrance with those fire extinguishers I convinced Elias to buy.”

“Oh yeah, totally,” Martin said, only slightly disappointed. He’d noticed his recent ploys to get Jon to convert had been, well, shittier than normal, but it was probably just the worm stress getting to him. He still definitely wanted Jon to ultimately end up as a puppet—er, servant—of the Web. Right?

“I’m, uh, just going to go get one now,” Jon said, gesturing towards the main doors and backing away slowly from Martin. 

“Right,” said Martin. “You go do that.”

“Right,” said Jon, before turning and fleeing into the Institute.

Haha, yeah, things were fine. 

Martin crouched down to examine the worm more closely. It stopped squirming immediately and looked up at him, despite the fact that it didn’t have eyes.

“Fuck off, Prentiss. Stalking is not cool,” he said sternly.

The worm responded by leaping for his face.

“Oh, what the _fuck_ ,” Martin screeched, stumbling backwards. Thankfully one of his pocket spiders had been able to intercept it, but Christ, those things were dangerous. Too bad Jon hadn’t been around to see how heroically his spider had taken it down. Maybe something like that could convince him that spiders weren’t all bad. 

Well, Martin would tell Jon when he got back with the fire extinguisher. Maybe Jon would even believe him this time.

— 

Surprisingly enough, Jon did believe him that the “parasites” were susceptible to spiders (probably because Martin showed him irrefutable evidence of his pocket spider devouring the worm on the stoop, but this was still surprising because many things Martin would have characterized as “irrefutable evidence” had failed to convince Jon in the past), but he still preferred to use the fire extinguishers since he claimed they were “considerably more efficient and significantly less creepy.” Martin disagreed on that last count, but was overruled by Tim and Sasha, the traitors.

Today, Jon was taking a statement from some guy who had come in muttering about “tooth apples,” whatever that meant. Martin had been content to languish in blissful ignorance about that specific phrase, but was unfortunately informed of its meaning against his will when Jon exited his office after the statement giver had left, holding...half of an apple studded with human teeth. 

“I need a consensus on this,” he announced to his assistants. “This is absolutely fake, correct?”

Tim looked up lazily from where he had apparently graduated from candle pentagrams to candle Tower of Pisas, and became immediately disgusted upon seeing the tooth apple. “Oh ewwwwww, Sasha, look at this shit!”

Sasha glanced up as well, and her face twisted with revulsion. “Ew, the Stranger is so nasty! I mean, I don’t eat food, but someone could have totally eaten that apple.”

“Right?” Tim agreed enthusiastically. “I mean, Stranger bitches are kinda fun to melt sometimes, what with all the plastic, but other than that, definitely a bottom tier Fear.”

“What,” said Jon flatly. 

“Oh, you know! The Stranger! The eldritch manifestation of the uncanny valley? They suck?” Sasha said helpfully. “Definitely don’t lean into the concept of unreality hard enough. Like, clowns, really? That’s the scariest thing they could come up with?”

“Okay, your strangely specific and personal feelings on whatever this is make me think you won’t be able to give an objective answer. Which means I’m going with my original hypothesis, which is that this is fake and the man I took the statement from has some serious issues. We should probably report this to the police, actually,” Jon said contemplatively, bringing the apple up to eye level to more closely examine the teeth. 

Martin cleared his throat. “You’re really not going to comment on, er, all that stuff about eldritch manifestations?”

Jon’s eyes left the apple to meet Martin’s, and he raised his eyebrows. “Oh, I know all you assistants have this enormous plot to get me to believe in whatever crazy supernatural entity you’ve made up this week, so I just filter all that out now.”

Well, that didn’t exactly bode well for Martin’s plans, however much they might have unconsciously taken the back burner. Martin was once again amazed at how one man could possibly contain such a potent mixture of stubbornness and cluelessness. He tried and failed to hold back his sigh of defeat. “...Of course, our ‘plot.’” 

“Yes, your plot. Anyway, I have realized that this apple is probably a biohazard, and I really should not be holding it in my bare hands. Tim, would you mind finding some gloves and disposing of it outside?”

Tim, who had gone back to stacking his candles crookedly, snapped back to attention in order to say, “No thanks?”

Jon closed his eyes and inhaled sharply, teeth locked in a somewhat terrifying grimace. “Great, thank you for your cooperation, Tim. Here you go,” he said, depositing the apple on Tim’s desk gently. “Also, I’m confiscating those candles. Again.”

Tim looked like he very much wanted to spit in Jon’s face or perhaps singe his eyebrow hair off, but maybe he was remembering the “Jon Loses His Shit At Tim For Seemingly No Reason” incident, because he did neither of those things. Instead, Tim leaned back excessively casually in his desk chair and smoothed his expression into an innocent smile as Jon attempted to dismantle the leaning candle towers without toppling them (a rather difficult feat, given their height). 

Martin sighed again, and went over to help Jon with the candles. When they had gathered them all up and deposited them in the giant box marked “FREE CANDLES” that Jon usually left outside on the street corner for this purpose, Jon turned to Martin with a strange expression on his face. 

“Martin, I—well, I want to apologize for last week. I already apologized to Tim individually, but it seemed like you were affected by—er, what I’m trying to say is that I know I’m your boss, and I can be a bit...intimidating sometimes, and I just don’t want you to be scared of me.” Jon smiled, though it looked somewhat strangled.

“Oh, no, Jon, I’m not scared of you! Don’t worry,” Martin said, trying to sound as reassuring as possible. He hadn’t been scared at all, just a bit surprised in the moment. And then awkward, because he was an awkward person, and Jon was also an awkward person, so the awkwardness was basically squared whenever they interacted. He told Jon as much (excluding that last part, obviously), and it seemed to relieve him, because his shoulders dropped back down from where they’d been riding up to his ears.

“Oh. Good! That’s really, er, good to hear,” Jon said, his smile now looking much less forced. 

“Yeah, no worries!” Martin said. And then, feeling bold, he nudged Jon’s arm and said conspiratorially, “So, bets on how long it is before Tim replaces those candles?”

“I would hope he never does, but knowing Tim and his persistence in attempting to unintentionally burn down the Archives, probably less than 24 hours,” Jon said, rolling his eyes, but he matched Martin’s playful tone.

“Such little faith in your assistants,” Martin said, shaking his head in mock admonishment. “I say twelve hours, maximum.”

Jon let out an aggrieved sigh, but he kept his smile the whole way back to the Archives.


	9. how much of a faux pas is it to not tip your local eldritch deliverymen? asking for a friend

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm sure you have better things to do on a friday night than read this fic, but again as i have zero impulse control, i'm posting this chapter now. If you've been commenting I love you <3333333

Martin was thoroughly enjoying having the Archives to himself on this fine Friday afternoon. With Jon uncharacteristically taking care of himself by going out to get lunch and Tim and Sasha probably on another employee terrorizing jag (Martin should really just ask them what they did when they disappeared during work hours instead of assuming the worst, but it was kind of an awkward conversation topic), Martin was free to ignore his work and have a pleasant chat with his spiders. He’d let them out of his pockets for some air, since it was rather cramped in there, and was just about to ask them for any good romance advice when there were several sharp raps on the main Archives door. 

“Uh, who is it?” Martin called hesitantly. Anyone who worked in the Archives would just burst in, Elias definitely didn’t bother to knock, and the rest of the Institute had definitely heard far too many horror stories about what went down in the Archives to dare venture down here. 

“Delivery,” came the answer, matter-of-fact and rough. Delivery? Martin hadn’t heard anything from Jon about an upcoming delivery or anything.

Martin left his spiders on his desk (but grabbed one of his big fucking tarantulas, just for insurance) and made his way to the door. “I don’t think we’re expecting a delivery,” he said politely through the door.

“This is ‘The Archives, The Magnus Institute, London’, innit?” 

Okay, wait a second, was that—? Martin opened the door on impulse and saw two enormous deliverymen, one holding a giant box and the other holding an extremely small one. Of course! Breekon and Hope, the premier eldritch monster delivery service. They technically belonged to the Stranger, but the Web was generally relatively friendly with the Stranger, so Martin had bumped into them a few times before and would generously call them acquaintances. As much as you could be acquaintances with a couple of codependent eldritch cockney deliverymen for hire, at least.

“Oh, hey guys. Long time no see! How’s the delivery business these days?” Martin asked.

Breekon and Hope made a variety of grunts that Martin assumed meant something like “you know, the usual.” He nodded sagely. “Right, yeah, totally, I get that. So those packages, are they for me, then?”

Breekon (or maybe Hope — they looked exactly the same and Martin was too embarrassed to ask who was who) handed him the smaller package wordlessly. It had Martin’s name on it in a loopy cursive font that he very unfortunately recognized. Annabelle Cane, professional nosy bitch and micromanager extraordinaire. And he had been enjoying not seeing her, hearing her, or thinking about her in any way, shape, or form so much...

Martin barely resisted the urge to frown at the package, and managed to smile instead only because he didn’t want to offend Breekon and Hope. It was entirely possible frowning at packages was a massive breach of delivery etiquette and Martin would rather keep his skin, thank you very much.

“Oh, great, thank you,” he said, voice only slightly strained. “You can just set that big one down over here by the desk.” 

Hope (or maybe Breekon) did so, and then backed up to stand next to his fellow deliveryman. They very deliberately did not turn to leave. Uh. Was Martin supposed to tip them or something? Fuck, he really couldn’t remember protocol here. In the interest of his skin, which he was very attached to (haha, literally), he smoothly scrambled for his wallet and handed each of them a twenty. 

They tipped their hats at him in thanks and disappeared up the steps towards the exit. Huh, really not the chattiest guys, were they?

Martin reluctantly opened the smaller package, which turned out to be an old lighter with a spider web pattern on it. Very subtle, Annabelle. There was also a tiny folded piece of paper shoved near the side of the box, which Martin unfolded to find a note, again in Annabelle’s handwriting.

“Dearest Martin,” it began, “I can’t believe it’s been so long since we talked! We really do need to go get coffee sometime!” She knew full well that Martin hated coffee, and also her. “I’m just sending you this little delivery because it looked like you needed some help! I mean, honestly, how many months have you been at that awful Institute? And you still haven’t been able to get rid of that pesky little Archivist? Honey, in the nicest way possible, you’re slipping.”

Martin paused to grind his teeth for a moment and seriously debated using the convenient lighter to burn up the note so he didn’t have to read the rest of it. But then Annabelle would probably just be an even bigger bitch the next time he was forced to interact with her. Goddamn it. Being an avatar of the Web when Annabelle was also an avatar of the Web was really like having to do a group project worth like half your grade with the kid that constantly passively-aggressively insulted everything you tried to do. Martin had not had the best childhood.

“So, anyway, here are some tools that might be able to help you make your, might I remind you, rather important assignment a success! First, the lighter in this box: very useful for burning down things, like maybe the Archives? Just a suggestion. And the other box: that’s a little surprise, in case you don’t feel like you have the, hm, strength of will needed to complete the assignment. All you have to do is chop it up a bit. I even threw an axe in there for you — they’re remarkably easy to find in central London!”

Martin decided immediately he was _not_ going to touch the contents of the other box. Anything Annabelle would call a “little surprise” was beyond bad news. The lighter could be useful, though, maybe? He slipped it in his pocket and looked back at the note.

“Good luck, Martin! I’m sure you won’t fail, since you know what that would mean! XOXO, Annabelle.”

Well, that was suitably ominous! God, he fucking hated that woman. Time to go hide the big box in the HR offices, which had been entirely empty for at least as long as Martin had been at the Institute (Martin had discovered this upon investigating why his complaint against Elias had never been processed, and it turned out it was because either Elias had brutally murdered the entire department, or there had never been an HR to begin with). 

— 

When the big box was satisfactorily hidden, Martin returned to the Archives, put all his spiders back in his pockets, and stared at the lighter he had taken out of his pocket to fit the spiders in. Burning down the Archives… Martin didn’t want to do it on principle, since it was something Annabelle had suggested, but it definitely was one viable way of getting rid of the Archivist without actually getting rid of Jon (he couldn’t be an Archivist if there were no Archives, right?). 

His contemplation was interrupted by Jon returning to the Archives. Sasha and Tim were still out, so maybe now was the perfect time to run that little idea past Jon?

“Hello Jon, thoughts on burning down the Archives and running away with me?” So that had not come out right. Oops.

Jon stared at him, eyebrows as furrowed as Martin had ever seen them. “Martin,” he said slowly, like he was talking to an insane person. “That is arson. Which is illegal. And also there are a lot of people in this building? Are you trying to prank me again or something?”

Shit, fuck, that was not how this conversation was supposed to go. Martin laughed nervously. “Ha, yeah, totally messing with you! You know me! I’m such a jokester. But also here’s this really cool lighter, just in case you ever change your mind!” He shoved the web lighter into Jon’s hand and fled past him for the door, mumbling something about using the bathroom. 

There was a worm on the stairs, but Martin was too busy mentally beating himself up to really worry about things like that. 

“You can’t just ask people to burn down their place of work and run away with you, Martin!” he hissed at himself. “Not until at least the second date!”

Well, time to hide in the bathroom and think about all times he had failed in life until Jon left for the day. At least he had his pocket spiders to lament at...


	10. fellas, is it gay to hold your boss/friend’s hand while running from evil eldritch worms?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we are nearing the end, y'all! i'm thinking probably like two more chapters? but i'm literally posting these as i write them, so don't quote me on that lmao. anyway, enjoy!

There were faint slamming noises coming from Jon’s office. That was a new one, but Martin very resolutely did not go over to check on Jon. He was sure Jon was fine. He could totally take care of himself. 

The slamming noises intensified.

...Surely it was nothing serious. Probably just Jon going after one of Martin’s spider spies that had gotten a little too cocky and been noticed. No need to go over and talk to him, or interact with him in any way. 

So maybe Martin had been avoiding Jon again. Come on, it was so embarrassing! Asking your boss to burn down their workplace and run away with you? How had Martin let that one escape the “gay pipe dreams” section of his mental filing cabinet?

Martin’s heated internal musings were interrupted by a sudden fucking _gunshot_ from Jon’s office. Martin jumped about a foot in the air and narrowly avoided falling out of his chair. 

Okay, fuck it, Tim and Sasha were out again, which meant Martin really had to check on that. Martin dashed to the office door as two more shots sounded and knocked frantically.

“Jon? Are you okay?” he asked urgently. 

Another gunshot.

God fucking damn it.

Martin threw the door open to witness Jon holding a literal smoking gun, staring down what indeed appeared to be one of Martin’s spiders, sitting innocently on a wall now riddled with bullets.

“You cocky fucker,” Jon hissed at the spider, apparently too focused on it to have noticed Martin pounding on the door, yelling his name, and loudly throwing open said door. 

“ _Jon_ ,” Martin said sharply.

Jon froze for a second, then shook his head rapidly like a wet dog. He turned to face Martin, holding the gun behind him like Martin would have somehow missed the extremely unsilenced gunshots and obvious bullet holes in the wall. “Ah, Martin. I was just...taking care of a little pest problem.” He made a valiant, if pathetic, attempt at a smile.

“You were using a gun. To kill a spider. Can you not see how that’s a problem?” Martin said, actually starting to get a little pissed now. Did Jon seriously hate spiders that much? Was Martin’s Entity so fucking abhorrent to Jon that he felt the need go after innocent, harmless spiders with a goddamn gun like this was some sort of alternate universe spider Kill Bill?

...Was that what he would do to Martin, if he knew the truth?

“To be fair, it tried to attack me, and the rolled up statement wasn’t working,” Jon said mildly.

“Oh, you mean it was sitting on the wall doing absolutely nothing threatening, and you decided to kill it for existing?” Martin shot back, mouth moving without much permission from his brain.

Jon finally looked irritated. Well, that had been a record period of good temper for him, Martin thought snidely, before feeling bad about thinking it. No wait, Martin was angry! Yeah! He was allowed to be mean sometimes!

“These are my Archives, and I think I’m well within my rights to determine and dispose of threats to it,” Jon snapped, brandishing the presumably still-loaded gun demonstratively. 

“Would you quit it with the gun?” Martin said exasperatedly. “I’m pretty sure you don’t actually know how to use it anyway.”

Jon scoffed. “Of course I know how to use it. Look, here’s the safety, which is off right now, here’s the barrel, here’s the grip, and you aim like this,” he said, aiming the gun dangerously close to Martin’s head. 

Martin ducked instinctively, and was suddenly level with one of the bullet holes in the wall, which his eyes were drawn to because there was a small white thing squirming its way out of the hole—holy shit, Prentiss’s worms were in the walls?

“Jon,” Martin said urgently, instantly forgetting about being angry. Now that he was looking closer, there were worms worming their way out of all of the holes Jon had made in the wall. 

Jon was still monologuing about how competent he was at guns and didn’t seem to hear Martin. 

Martin straightened up, braving the firing zone of Jon’s wildly waving gun-holding hand, and grabbed Jon firmly by the shoulders.

Jon trailed off and looked up at Martin with a mix of curiosity and annoyance. “Martin, what?”

“Worms,” Martin said, turning Jon bodily around to face the wall just as the entire thing creaked and cracked and fell forward into the room, along with a sea of thousands of squiggling white worms. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” said Martin and Jon simultaneously, finally on the same page. 

Martin reached immediately for his pocket spiders, but then hesitated. What if Jon decided Martin was as bad as his spiders? But it wasn’t even a choice, not really.

Martin shoved Jon behind him and let the spiders loose. They poured out of his pockets with a vengeance and set upon the worms just as furiously as they had back in the Vittery apartment basement. 

But there were just too many worms.

Martin turned to Jon, whose eyes were wide, though he didn’t look as shocked as Martin would’ve expected. “There’s too many of them, we have to go!”

Jon’s expression hardened into Business Mode. “There’s a filing room — strong door, climate controlled,” he said rapidly.

Perfect. “Lead the way!” Martin said, backing away from where the rising tide of worms was quickly overwhelming his spiders. 

Jon grabbed his hand, and Martin took half a second to have a mini freakout over that before Jon started to drag him out of the office and into the Archives proper. 

Martin ruthlessly banished the gay thoughts and dashed forward. He risked a glance back as they left the office, feeling a pang at the sad fate of his spiders, then sprinted after Jon to the filing room, hyperaware of Jon’s hand pressed against his. 

Jon let go of his hand to unlock the room (Martin fought down an involuntary rush of disappointment), and slammed the door shut behind them. Then he shoved a chair underneath the doorknob for good measure. 

They both slumped to the ground as if on cue, lungs heaving from the sprint. 

“Okay,” Jon breathed. 

“Okay,” Martin echoed.

Martin let the silence build between them for a few moments as they caught their breath. But then he couldn’t help blurting out, “I know you saw my pocket spiders. There is literally no way you could have missed that, not this time. But you didn’t even seem that surprised? And those worms are clearly _not_ just a parasite. So seriously, what is your deal?”

“Ah,” said Jon, avoiding eye contact by pretending to be very interested in the carpet, “yes. I’ll admit I haven’t been—entirely honest with you. About my belief in the supernatural. Among other things.” He paused for a few seconds, still staring at the floor.

“Care to elaborate?” Martin asked, his hope warring violently with a growing sense of betrayal. 

Jon looked up and met Martin’s eyes, uncomfortably intense. “Martin, I’ve always believed. Because I’m an avatar, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hahaha yeah sorry, left you guys on a cliffhanger ;) 
> 
> but don't worry! the next chapter should be out soon, since i'm almost done w finals :)


	11. the part where he—well, you’ll see ;)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i got such a massive hit of serotonin straight to the brainstem from all you lovely people commenting on the last chapter that i wrote the entire next chapter basically immediately! thank you guys so much, ily all, please enjoy <333

“Okay, sorry, I think I must have heard you wrong. You’re a _what_?”

“Martin, I’m an avatar. Of the Slaughter. I’ve been doing a terrible job of hiding it, really thought it was obvious,” Jon said contemplatively, tapping his chin.

“But,” said Martin. “I—you—”

“Have this gun on me all the time? Fly into rages with little to no provocation?” Jon prompted, raising the gun and an eyebrow.

“...I just thought you needed some anger management training!” Martin said plaintively. His brain was still refusing to compute. Jon = avatar? No way. This was some kind of weird fever dream, right? Because otherwise that would mean everyone else in the Archives was an idiot—no, wait, that actually tracked. 

Jon chuckled. “I suppose that isn’t completely wrong. But yes, I’ve been an avatar since before I got here.”

This was seriously wild. “Wait, but why would Elias hire you if you’re with the Slaughter? The only reason me and Sasha and Tim are still here is that I use my powers on Elias every time he tries to fire any of us. How did you not get found out by someone who’s basically omniscient?”

“Oh, easy. I can feel his Eyes on me any time he tries to look into my mind, and I just think very aggressively about archiving.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, I think it’s some secondary Slaughter danger sense, maybe. Also, Elias is stupid.”

Well, Martin wasn’t going to argue with that last point. But also. “So like a spidey sense?” he asked, trying not to smirk. “And you’re like Spiderman, but with a gun?”

Jon stared at the ceiling for several seconds, perhaps praying for strength or communing with the Slaughter for guidance. So it was possible Martin had very little knowledge of what serving the Slaughter was like. “...Sure, Martin,” he ground out finally, but Martin had spent enough time around him when he was corralling Tim and Sasha to catch the note of humor in his voice. 

Another thought occurred to Martin. “Okay, but also, what are you doing here? What does the Slaughter even want with the Institute?” 

“That seems like something I should _not_ be telling an avatar of a rival Fear,” Jon said, looking sideways at Martin.

Fair, but Martin was now deathly curious. “What about a quid pro quo? I’ll tell you why I’m here, and you tell me why _you’re_ here.”

Jon smirked. “Martin, I already know why you’re here. You’re supposed to get rid of me—well, the Archivist.”

“Whaaaaaat?” said Martin, putting on his best ‘who, me?’ expression. “Get rid of you? I would never… Okay fine, I was supposed to get rid of you. Or convert you! Basically just get you to leave the Institute! I was never going to kill you, I promise!”

Jon smiled more genuinely and put his hand on top of Martin’s. Martin’s brain short circuited slightly. He hoped that the screaming sound that seemed to be ringing in his ears was from inside his brain, and not coming out of his mouth.

“I believe you, don’t worry,” Jon said gently. “And fine, I can tell you why I was here. It’s really not that interesting. The Slaughter just hates Elias’s weasel ass and they had me come here undercover to keep an eye on him and make sure he’s not up to anything terrible.” He had apparently caught Martin’s badly disguised titter, because he added, with an eye roll, “Pun not intended.” 

“Okay, last question,” Martin said, trying to contain the smile that had sprung unbidden to his face as soon as Jon’s hand had started touching his again. “Why didn’t you tell any of us assistants, if you knew we were all avatars, too?”

“What part of ‘undercover’ did you miss?” Jon said, and—was that a wink? If this kept up, Martin was seriously going to have to invest in a fainting couch or something.

Martin’s continued gay crisis was cut mercifully short by a sudden knocking at the door. Both Jon and Martin stiffened and looked towards it, all traces of their brief good mood gone. 

The knocking continued, sounding distinctly irritated. Hm. Martin army crawled his way over to the door and peeked through the small window on the upper half of it to see...Elias? Fucker. He could stay out there and get eaten by worms.

“Who is it?” Jon hissed from behind him. 

“Elias,” Martin hissed back.

“He can stay out there and get eaten by worms,” Jon said. 

“Right?” They were really on the same wavelength here. 

Elias pounded on the window, dragging Martin’s attention reluctantly back. He mouthed something that might have either been “I’m here to help, please let me in,” or “I’m here to kill you and your stupid crush, Martin.” Martin was not great at reading lips, but his money was definitely on the latter. 

“I think he said he’s here to kill us?” Martin said, looking back at Jon over his shoulder. 

“That seems wildly out of character based on his usual modus operandi,” Jon said doubtfully. 

“Fine, it’s also possible he said he was here to help.”

“Hm,” Jon said, sounding conflicted. 

“Well, do I let him in?” Martin asked, desperately hoping Jon would reiterate the whole “leave him for the worms” thing they’d had going a minute ago. 

“Well, as much as I dislike and distrust him...we do need all the help we can get with this. I suppose you can let him in.”

Damn it. Martin moved the chair out from under the doorknob and opened it a crack. “Elias,” he said coldly.

“Martin,” Elias returned, equally cold. “Would you kindly move aside so I can enter the room and avoid being eaten by worms?” As if on cue, there was a disgusting, wet squirming noise from behind him.

Martin sighed, but stepped aside so Elias could pass, shutting the door and replacing the chair behind him.

But before he could turn back around, he heard Jon gasp in sudden horror and the whoosh of a heavy object moving through the air towards him. 

Martin ducked sideways, spinning around to see Elias hit the chair instead of Martin’s head with a fucking _metal pipe_. It cracked against the seat with a sickening snapping noise. What the fuck?

“Martin!” cried Jon, rising to his feet, gun in hand. 

“Shit,” muttered Elias. “That was...unfortunate.” 

He adjusted his hands on the pipe and swung at Martin’s head again, but Martin blocked it with his arms, wincing as it connected. Unfortunately, the momentum pushed him backward into a filing cabinet, and he slipped to one knee, Elias looming above him. 

“Goodbye, Martin,” Elias growled, raising the pipe high, but before he could swing it— _BANG_. Elias crumpled to his knees, blood gushing from his forehead. 

“Oh my god,” Martin squeaked, scrambling to his feet to get away from him. He looked over at Jon to see him blow the smoke off of his revolver like a goddamn action hero. 

“Well, that’s what happens when you bring a pipe to a gunfight,” Jon said, seeming way cooler with this whole murdering the Head of the Institute thing than Martin would have expected. Because despite all his eldritch Eye powers or immortality or whatever, Elias looked extremely dead. Apparently Slaughter powers overrode petty little things like that?

“Holy shit,” Martin said. 

“I told you I knew how to use a gun,” Jon said, looking far too vindicated for the situation at hand. 

“Are we sure this won’t have any adverse effects on, you know, us?” Martin asked, not at all frantically. “Isn’t he like the ‘beating heart of the Institute’ or whatever?”

Jon shrugged bonelessly. “Everyone in the Archives is an avatar of a different Entity. I believe we’re pretty well shielded from any kind of supernatural backlash. And as far as I know, the rest of the Institute is totally normal and not actually psychically tied to it at all.”

That was enough to convince Martin, at least. He let out a sigh of relief and left the side of the room that had Elias’s bloody corpse (what _were_ they going to do with that thing) to stand next to Jon. 

“Well, thank you,” Martin said, nudging Jon’s shoulder. “Much better use for that gun than killing spiders, in my humble opinion.”

“You _would_ think that,” Jon said wearily, but his lips turned up at the corners.

Martin opened his mouth to continue bantering, but before he could think of something intelligent to say, there was a loud squirming sound from outside the door, and he saw worms pressing themselves against the window glass. Right, shit, the worms. With all the excitement of nearly getting brutally pipe murdered, he’d almost forgotten the Archives were under attack by an insane worm woman.

“Sooooo,” Martin said, looking hopefully at Jon. “Now what?”


	12. why, oh why did we let tim come up with the team name?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so if you read my chapter notes, you'll notice i clearly lied when i said only two more chapters until the end, two chapters ago. since i'm apparently incapable of actually predicting how many chapters it'll take to get through my outline, i'm just going to say we'll get there when we get there, like i'm the mom on a family road trip. so uh, enjoy?

Fortunately, Martin and Jon only had to spend about thirty seconds staring blankly at each other and wracking their brains for any semblance of a workable plan.

This was because thirty seconds into their brainstorming session, the far wall of the room burst apart in an explosion of plaster chunks, and Tim and Sasha came sailing through it like knockoff Kool Aid Men. 

Jon and Martin screamed, and then pretended like they hadn’t. This was not super effective, as both Sasha and Tim immediately started laughing at them.

“Tim, Sasha, what are you two doing in...the walls?” Jon said stiffly, in a vain attempt to recover his dignity. 

“Oh my god, the look on your face,” Tim wheezed, almost doubled over with laughter. 

“Did you—hear how high pitched—his scream was?” Sasha asked him, barely getting the words out through her laughter and cradling the fire extinguisher she’d been carrying to her chest.

“ _Excuse me_ ,” Jon snapped. Martin was definitely on Jon’s side on this one, because, uh, super uncool to jump out at people who had already almost been eaten by worms and _then_ almost brutally pipe murdered all in the past fifteen minutes. Even if there was no way for Tim and Sasha to have known about the last one. It was the principle of the thing. 

“Holy shit is that a corpse?” Tim said abruptly, cutting off his own laughter and walking over to go inspect Elias’s body.

“ _Tim_ —” Jon tried futilely. 

“Dude, you killed Elias? Damn, that’s crazy,” Tim said, sounding genuinely impressed for once in his life. 

“Oh wow, seriously?” Sasha said, in an immensely proud yet surprised tone of voice that a mother might use upon hearing that her C-student son had gotten an A in organic chemistry. “Well, congrats, never thought you had it in you!” she continued warmly, putting a hand on Jon’s shoulder and leaving an unnaturally long and spindly plaster dust handprint on his sweater. 

“Please, for the love of god, stop ogling Elias’s corpse and _listen to me for a goddamn second_ ,” Jon said, brushing off Sasha’s hand and looking like he was strongly resisting the urge to grind his teeth into bits. 

“What Jon is trying to say,” Martin said quickly, feeling that now was probably a good time to jump in and smooth things over before Jon decided to start using his gun on some more avatars, “is that we’re glad to see you alive and well, but we really need to come up with some kind of strategy here before we’re all eaten alive by an evil corpse and her army of sentient worms.” He gestured to the window in the door, which was now fully obscured by fat, wiggling worm bodies. Ew. “Also, I’m somewhat curious how exactly you got here? What is going on with the walls in this place?”

“Oh, right,” said Tim, kicking Elias’s head idly on his way back to their side of the room. “So Sasha and I were coming back from….lunch, and the Archives were, like, filled with those gross worms that Jon kept making everyone kill with the fire extinguishers. So we were like, ‘Well, this isn’t ideal. We should probably get some of those fire extinguishers.’ Which was a great idea, except that we didn’t actually know where they were.”

“Oh, I, er….hid them in the case file boxes so the worms wouldn’t know they were there,” Martin said rapidly under his breath. What? It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

Jon put his face in his hands and mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like, “Really Jon? Really? This is the man you chose to have feelings for?” But then again Martin was probably just hearing things. Wishful thinking. ...Unless?

Tim shrugged. “Well, that explains it,” he said, interrupting Martin’s internal spiral into Gay Overanalysis Hell. “Anyway, we decided to check Jon’s office, fought our way over there using my, you know—” here he wiggled his suddenly melty fingers demonstratively “—on any bitch ass worm that tried to jump us. Honestly I have no idea if they’d even be able to hurt anyone but Jon, considering the rest of our...statuses, but better safe than sorry, right?”

“Oh, now that my cover’s been blown, I suppose I might as well let you two know, too,” Jon interjected. 

Sasha and Tim stared at him blankly. “Your what?” said Tim.

“I’m an avatar of the Slaughter. Have been this whole time.”

“Oh, _shit!_ ” Tim said excitedly. “You got us so good!” He slapped Jon on the back in a vigorously congratulatory manner, and Jon did a bad job of disguising a wince. “That explains so much, actually.”

“Right?” Sasha agreed. “All those times he flew into rages with little to no provocation? It all makes sense now.”

Jon looked at Martin like “I told you so.” Martin rolled his eyes back at him. In Martin’s defense, Tim and Sasha also hadn’t put any of the pieces together until being told point blank. 

“So then what happened?” Martin prompted Tim, looking back over his shoulder at the worms squirming against the glass. They kind of needed to get this show on the road before they were all worm food.

“Oh, then we found that fire extinguisher in Jon’s office and used it on the worms, but there were kind of a lot of them and we thought we heard Jane Prentiss coming, so we hopped through the giant empty hole where one of the walls used to be and found these super cool, creepy tunnels. I think about 90% of the worms are in the Archives right now, because the tunnels were pretty empty. But the worms in there are hella fast. They kept trying to jump at our faces, and I had to bat them out of the air like some kind of fucked up game of badminton.” Tim paused, perhaps reminiscing on the fucked up badminton. “And then we saw this weird looking wall on the side of the tunnel, and I was like, ‘Should we smash through this?’ and Sasha was like, ‘Sounds delightful, let’s do it,’ and then we smashed through it, and here we are!”

Tim spread his arms in a terrible, though heartfelt, attempt at jazz hands. “Tada!”

“Wonderful,” Jon said dryly. “So you’re able to kill the worms with your heat? And would you be able to retrace your steps through the tunnels to my office?”

“Yes to the first part, hard maybe to the second,” Tim said, sounding faintly guilty for about two seconds before his roguish grin came roaring back. “But hey! It’ll be an adventure! The Archives Avatar Posse, on an epic journey through the creepy tunnels under the Institute to take down the evil worm woman who dared invade our home base.”

“Yeah!” Sasha cheered, giving Tim a high five (high fives with Sasha were...interesting, to say the least, but again, Martin hypothesized that Tim didn’t need to worry about nerve damage, what with his wax skin). 

“Jesus Christ,” Jon said to the ceiling with feeling, looking as if he was highly regretting revealing that he was not, in fact, an oblivious, 100% human skeptic. 

“Sounds great,” Martin said, jabbing Jon with his elbow. “We can get back to Jon’s office, grab the rest of the fire extinguishers out of the case file boxes, and go spray Prentiss with them!”

“Yeah!” Tim and Sasha cheered, high fiving again. “Archives Avatar Posse!”

“Jon, you in?” Martin said, turning to make eye contact with him. 

Jon’s gaze said “please god help me,” but his mouth said, “...Fine. But only if you stop calling us—that.” 

“What, Archives Avatar Posse?” Sasha asked, fluttering her eyelashes innocently. 

“Why do I bother,” Jon muttered, stepping through the crumbled wall and into the tunnels. 

“Don’t mind him, I think that’s a great name!” Martin said, only lying a little bit. He wouldn’t admit it out loud, but it was fun to finally be part of a group that wasn’t made up of literal spiders, even if it did have kind of a stupid name. No offense to his pocket spiders.

He followed Jon into the tunnels, Tim and Sasha right behind him. Both of them seemed to be chanting “AAP” under their breath.

...This was going to be an interesting “adventure.”


	13. good night, sweet statements, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello hello, you lovely people! i have a concrete ending for this fic now: after this one, just one more chapter. i actually have the last chapter written and just have to proofread it (i know, how uncharacteristic of me), so i'll probably be posting it tomorrow sometime! i was just very eager to write it because it deals with some exciting plot things that have been a long time coming and also things that mean a lot to me!! you'll see soon enough :)
> 
> so enjoy this chapter, and i'll see y'all soon one last time <3

Martin probably should have expected this, but he still felt his stomach sinking in disappointment when, about three minutes after they’d entered the tunnels, Sasha and Tim stopped chanting to announce cheerfully that they were lost. 

“Seriously?” Jon groaned.

“Yes, seriously,” Sasha said, almost chidingly. “Would we lie to you?”

There were a good five seconds of silence as everyone contemplated the truly massive amount of times they’d been lied to by Sasha, an avatar of the power of Lies. Martin resisted the urge to start counting on his fingers for effect.

“Okay, fine, point taken,” she said good-naturedly. “But for real this time, we’re lost. Right, Tim?”

Tim smiled blindingly at them, the light of his phone torch reflecting painfully off his teeth and into Martin’s eyes. “Yup! Guess it’ll be even more of an adventure than we thought! This is even better bonding time than when Elias sent us to that team building place.” 

Martin recalled that incident in unfortunate detail, as both his and Jon’s egos had been shattered beyond repair. Jon had sworn he would shoot the next person who so much as mentioned it, which Martin was now realizing might not have been as much of an exaggeration as he’d thought at the time. But he didn’t blame Jon — who could have known a children’s escape room would be so challenging, and so dangerous? Looking back, that had probably been some kind of twisted revenge plot Elias had dreamed up after trying and failing to fire Martin for the first time. Well, guess who had the last laugh now? Only one of them was a corpse lying face down in a filing room, and it wasn’t Martin!

“I have this gun right here in my hand,” Jon said flatly to Tim, interrupting Martin’s silent, extremely justified gloating. So clearly he hadn’t forgotten either.

“Oh sorry, boss, forgot how much you hated that trip,” Tim said, still grinning and sounding anything but apologetic. 

Jon growled audibly, but in an amazing win for his self-control, didn’t try to shoot Tim. Archives camaraderie was truly at an all time high. 

“So, now what?” Martin asked, feeling as if he’d been posing that exact question far too many times lately. 

“I suppose we could just wander aimlessly for hours! That sounds fun,” Sasha said, now leaning casually against the tunnel wall. “Or if you want to be boring, we could also follow this trail of burnt worms that Tim hit out of the air on our way here.” She pointed at the ground, where the torchlight fell on what indeed looked like a vague trail of very crispy worms. 

“Oh, very nice!” Martin said, and clapped Sasha on the shoulder before immediately regretting it. Oof, ow, his nerve endings. 

“Thank god,” muttered Jon, immediately beginning to follow the worm trail and leaving the rest of them in the dust. 

“Hey, wait up!” Tim called loudly as he, Sasha, and Martin jogged after Jon. “No splitting up the Archives Avatar Posse!”

— 

The burnt worm trail was surprisingly thorough. Tim must have played an extremely long, extremely fucked up game of badminton. And the worms must have been pretty stupid to keep jumping at someone who had the power to toast them to death. Martin’s spiders would never be so foolish, which was just one of many reasons why the Web was far superior to the Corruption (the main reason being that the Corruption was fucking gross). 

Within fifteen minutes, they could see light streaming sideways into the tunnel up ahead, presumably from the caved in wall in Jon’s office. There were some live worms on the ground ahead of them now, wriggling frantically, but the whole...posse crushed them with their shoes wordlessly. They really had to come up with a better team name.

Tim and Sasha motioned that they would lead the way into the office, which made sense since Sasha still had the fire extinguisher and Tim had his magic melty hands. Even if Martin and Jon _wanted_ to brave a possible close encounter with Prentiss (given that Martin had already experienced one in Vittery’s basement, he would very much like to avoid a repeat incident), Martin was fresh out of spiders and Jon’s gun was not the most effective worm-fighting tool (also between destroying the wall in his office and killing Elias, he had to be almost out of bullets, unless there was another secondary Slaughter power of infinite ammo). 

So Tim and Sasha crept forward, taking this whole thing surprisingly seriously given their usual attitudes towards pretty much anything, and Martin and Jon followed silently a few paces behind. Martin glanced over at Jon. He was gripping his gun tightly, looking somewhere between determined and terrified. 

“We’ve got this,” Martin whispered to him, in his most heartening tone of voice.

“Shut up, Martin,” Jon hissed back. But a second later, he added, “Sorry, I didn’t mean that. We’ve just got to be quiet.”

Martin gave him a thumbs up and made the zipping lips gesture. Jon rolled his eyes, but he looked fond, so maybe Martin had actually been able to cheer him up a bit. 

Tim and Sasha reached the edge of the fallen wall and peeked carefully through the gap into Jon’s office. Martin tensed, picturing a flood of worms falling from the ceiling and devouring them whole (what, that could totally happen). But nothing fell from the ceiling or jumped from the floor, and they both stepped into the office. 

“Clear,” Tim whispered back to Martin and Jon. “I’ve always wanted to say that,” he continued under his breath, probably louder than intended. 

Jon and Martin entered the office as well. It looked mostly the same as it had when they’d fled from it earlier that day: fallen wall riddled with bullet holes, papers strewn across the desk, door hanging half-open. Except apparently the worms liked the taste of paper, because all of Jon’s statements now looked half eaten and stained with some kind of disgusting white wormy fluid. There were lots of dead worms and a few live ones blanketing every flat surface in the room, along with a fair number of fallen spiders (Martin’s heart ached at that), but it seemed like most of them had moved further into the main Archives area, perhaps in search of greener pastures, so to speak. 

“Oh come on, really?” Jon whined quietly upon seeing the gory destruction of his papers. “What did those files ever do to you?” he demanded of one of the remaining worms that was still chomping industriously away at a file folder. The worm ignored him and continued chomping. 

“I don’t think those worms understand English,” Martin whispered helpfully. 

“Okay, so the fire extinguishers are out there in the boxes by your desk, right?” Tim asked Martin before Jon could respond to his comment. 

Martin nodded. If they could get to those extinguishers, they definitely had a good chance of being able to incapacitate Prentiss. Ideally her corpse was as vulnerable to the CO2 as the worms inhabiting it, or at least if they killed the “host” it would kill the rest of the worms. Probably wishful thinking, since nothing in Martin’s life had ever worked out that easily, but he could always hope. 

Tim pushed the door to the office open further carefully, and stepped out into the Archives proper. Directly into Jane Prentiss, who had evidently been standing right behind the door. 

Well, fuck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay, i _had_ to get you guys with a cliffhanger at least one more time ;)


	14. ah, so there actually was a legit reason for jon to hate spiders. that would have been nice to know about, oh, 13 chapters ago. but hey, happy ending, folks!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well, this is it, you guys. last chapter! i know it's not that long a fic, all things considered, but it's officially the longest piece of writing i've ever created, and i had such a fun time writing it! thank you so much to everyone who kudosed or commented, especially those of you who commented on every chapter (love y'all so much <3). 
> 
> this chapter has Canon Ace Jon, because i am so grateful to jonny for giving us a canon bi ace character, and am i really properly pushing the ace agenda if i don't project massively on him?? (don't answer that)
> 
> feel free to hit me up on tumblr [@thepitifu1chi1dren](https://thepitifu1chi1dren.tumblr.com/) if you ever want to talk about tma, how tma should be a comedy and I should write the podcast instead, etc. (but for real, i don't bite! and i'd love to talk about tma with someone who isn't my sister, because she's probably going to brutally pipe murder me in cold blood the next time i try).
> 
> this author's note got way longer than i intended, so sorry about that! i'm going to shut up now -- go enjoy the chapter, and thank you so much for reading <3

Tim stared at Prentiss. Prentiss stared at Tim. The worms in her holes wiggled violently, readying themselves to jump out at him.

“Well, this is awkward,” Tim said.

“Oh my god, just burn her up already!” Sasha cried, apparently the one currently in possession of the singular Archives brain cell. 

“Oh yeah, that,” said Tim, and then splayed his hands wide and pressed them to Prentiss’s face.

Almost immediately, all the worms began to writhe and scream in agony, an indescribably horrible, all-encompassing sound that reminded Martin vaguely of Jon’s usual reaction to seeing spiders in his office. Jon dropped his gun to put his fingers in his ears, and Martin quickly followed suit.

Prentiss wailed in despair, too, clawing violently at Tim’s hands, but her fingers just got stuck in Tim’s melty wax skin. Some of the worms leapt from her body like wildlife fleeing a forest fire, and Martin stumbled back nervously as they flew towards him and Jon. 

But before the worms could reach the two of them, Sasha stepped forward, fire extinguisher at the ready, and blasted them back with foam.

“Go Sasha!” Martin cheered, though he couldn’t really hear himself over the myriad of worm screams and the fingers in his ears.

Soon enough, the noise died down to nothing. Martin and Jon uncovered their ears, and the spray of the fire extinguisher dissipated enough for Martin to see Tim standing over a pile of ashes and extra crispy worms. He spun on his heel, dusted his hands off, and waggled his fingers at Jon.

“See, boss? These babies are good for much more than just melting down office supplies,” Tim said proudly. 

“ _You_ were the one stealing my—” Jon started angrily, then cut himself off with an aggressive inhale. “Of course you were,” he muttered. “Regardless, thank you, Tim, and Sasha as well. I very much appreciate this.”

“Yeah! Sasha, Tim, that was amazing!” Martin said excitedly. “And I think killing Prentiss made the rest of the worms die, like they can’t live without their host!” At least from a cursory glance around the Archives, it seemed as if the worms covering the floor, and walls, and part of the ceiling had stopped moving and curled up into little death circles (the ones on the ceiling were beginning to fall like disgusting wormy hailstones). “How on earth did I get that lucky?” he mused to himself.

“Hell yeah!” said Tim, holding his hands out for a double high five. They appeared to be steaming and/or smoking, so Martin decided to give him an air high five instead. Tim didn’t seem to mind. He slung an arm across Sasha’s shoulders (she didn’t appear to be affected by the heat, but that was probably because she didn’t exist entirely in this plane of existence), and grinned cockily down at her. 

“What do you say we go out for Lunch 2: Electric Boogaloo so we don’t have to deal with whatever cleanup or law enforcement questioning that happens after an evil worm woman invades and your boss kills his boss?”

“Hey, wait a second,” said Jon, but by then Sasha had already enthusiastically agreed and the pair had strolled halfway to the Archives exit, smashing innumerable dead worms underfoot.

“What about the Archives Avatar Posse?” Martin called after them lamely, also very much not wanting to deal with, you know, the consequences of their actions today.

“Oh, I’m sure you two can handle it,” Tim said over his shoulder, giving Martin a very exaggerated wink.

“Yeah, good luck, you crazy kids!” Sasha added cheerily, also winking at Martin. Then they were gone, the door to the Archives banging shut behind them.

Martin did not want to think about the implications of those winks. Or maybe he did… He turned to Jon. “So,” he said for the third time today, “now what?”

Jon didn’t immediately respond, rubbing at his ankle with his brows furrowed in what looked like pain. 

“Uh, Jon, is your ankle okay?” Martin asked nervously. The worms were all dead, right? And Sasha had gotten the ones flying at them with her fire extinguisher.

Jon frowned, and brushed the dead worms off his desk chair and the middle of his desk so he could sit down and prop his leg up for closer inspection. He leaned forward to roll up his pant leg a bit, and suddenly recoiled. 

Martin leapt forward. “Jon, is that…?”

Jon shuddered. “Yes, it appears one of the worms got through the CO2 from Sasha’s fire extinguisher,” he said evenly, but he seemed a little frightened. The worm probably couldn’t do much damage to an avatar of another Fear, even if it was alive, but with the Corruption, you never really knew. It only needed the tiniest foothold...

“Okay, don’t worry, we’ll get it out,” Martin said, trying to project calm (easier said than done). “Let me just find something…” He trailed off, casting his gaze wildly around the office to look for anything that would be useful. A sudden tickle on his hand made him jump, but when he looked down, he discovered one of his pocket spiders!

That was it! He lifted the spider up for Jon to see. “This little guy can pull it out for us!”

Jon recoiled again. “Oh, no thank you, I believe the worm will be just fine inside my leg,” he said, sounding somewhat manic, and began rapidly rolling his pant leg back down.

“Jon—Jon, wait!” Martin said, fear for Jon’s safety and fear of his irrational spider hatred battling in his stomach. “Just...why do you hate spiders so much?” It came out much more plaintively than Martin had intended, and they looked at each other uncomfortably.

Jon smiled humorlessly at Martin. “Long story,” he said shortly, heaving his leg off the desk and breaking eye contact. 

Martin frowned. This could actually be dangerous, and he was not going to let Jon just brush him off. And if he figured out why Jon hated spiders, maybe he could—maybe they could—well, maybe they’d be able to work something out, even if Martin was an avatar of the Spider. 

“Jon, I know I’m literally an avatar of the thing you despise, but I just—I want to understand. I won’t make fun of you for it or anything, I promise,” Martin said softly.

Jon sighed, long and deep. And then he told Martin about Mr. Spider. 

Well, holy shit. That explained a lot. 

“I’m so sorry,” Martin said, tentatively resting a hand (the one without the spider) on Jon’s where it was laying flat on the de-wormified part of the desk. “I know I’m part of the Web, but I wouldn’t ever wish something like that on a child. I understand if you, you know, don’t want anything to do with me,” he continued, as what Jon had told him really sank in, and drew his hand gently away. Jon meant a lot to him, but if spending time with him was at the expense of making Jon relive his trauma…

“Martin, wait,” Jon said, grabbing Martin’s hand back before it could get out of reach.

“I know you’re not—like that,” he said, “or at least I don’t think you are. And I’m not exactly the best at this but...would you like to run away from this crime scene and get dinner with me?”

Martin stared at him. His brain was refusing to compute again. Was Jon asking him on a date? Not only on a date, but also asking him to run away from their workplace together? His head spun.

“Oh, no, that was too forward, wasn’t it,” Jon muttered frustratedly. He let go of Martin’s hand. “God, why am I so terrible at romance?”

Martin’s brain finally managed to rewire its connection to his mouth. “I would love to have dinner and run away from a crime scene with you,” he blurted out, hardly believing this was happening. Jon? Martin? Date? Together?

“Oh, good,” Jon said, looking relieved and very tentatively happy. “But, er, I want to tell you something beforehand. Um. So. I’ll just say it. I’m asexual. Which means I’m not sexually attracted to anyone, and I’m also sex repulsed, which means I don’t ever want to have sex with you. Or anyone.” He tensed up, as if waiting for a blow. 

But Martin smiled at him. “Jon, that’s totally fine. Sex isn’t a necessity or a priority for me in a relationship, and this doesn’t change the way I feel about you at all. And actually, I had kind of already guessed.”

Jon’s tension eased, but now he seemed almost indignant. “What? How? I never told anyone in the Archives until now!”

Martin fought back a giggle. “Okay, literally last week you told me that whoever decided that putting sex scenes in movies was a good idea should be, quote, arrested and tried for crimes against humanity, unquote.”

“Is that not the general consensus?” Jon asked, raising an eyebrow at Martin.

“Yeah, not so much,” Martin said. Well, he didn’t think so, at least. “Also, I might have noticed your ring and looked up what it meant.” He pointed to the black ring on Jon’s right middle finger. “For very non-creepy, workplace appropriate reasons.” 

Jon narrowed his eyes. “Non-creepy, you say?” he echoed dubiously. 

“I—well—er—I’m sorry?” Martin stuttered out. Had he really fucked this up before it had even begun? Damn it, damn it, _damn it_.

Then Jon’s face split into an uncharacteristically wide grin. “I’m messing with you,” he said, knocking Martin’s arm with his hand. “I actually appreciate the...research you put in. It certainly makes explaining easier for me.”

“You’re welcome?” Martin said, currently experiencing severe emotional whiplash. He definitely hadn’t expected a joke. Had Jon ever joked with him before? Maybe this was a sign Jon felt more comfortable around him now. Martin quickly smiled back.

“Okay, but actually we should probably get out of here before the police show up,” he said, suddenly reminded that, oh, right, they were sitting in a place absolutely dripping with dead, oozing worms, and Elias’s body was lying in a filing room. “And get that worm out of your ankle, if you’re alright with it, because the Corruption is some nasty shit,” 

“Fair enough,” said Jon. “I think I can deal with the spider, as long as I know you’re directing it the whole time. But hey, what about your assignment from the Web? Are they going to track me down and try to kill me? Because I know those avatars aren’t all as friendly as you are.”

Martin thought about it for a second. _Was_ his assignment complete? He hadn’t killed Jon, or converted him. But since they were both clearly leaving the Institute behind…

“Yeah, I think this counts,” Martin said honestly. “The assignment was mainly just to get rid of the Archivist, and I honestly don’t think you ever really _were_ the Archivist, since you’re already an avatar of the Slaughter. Plus, we’re running away from here.”

“Very true,” Jon said warmly, pushing up from the desk chair and sliding his hand in Martin’s once again. “Shall we? Run away, that is?”

“Let’s,” Martin replied, squeezing his hand tight. 

They walked hand in hand out of the office, across the carpet of dead worms, and towards the exit to the Archives, ready to leave this lovely, godforsaken place one last time.

Then Martin remembered what Jon had distracted him from with all the beautiful gay hand-holding. 

“Oh shit, your ankle worm!”


End file.
